WALKING DEL DIOS

We walk the neighborhood before supper,
hand in hand past the house
where the old woman tended goats.
She is dead now and the goats are gone,
the house redone with a landscaped yard.
Past the purple and green house
where they used to keep chickens,
“A bad sign,” I say, “the disappearance
of all this farm life.”
We stop to smell the pink climbing rose
at the pink house with the amber
bottles in the window,
the one where the lady feeds birds,
the house where there are always quail.
I admire a fat-blossomed geranium
by someone’s door.
The Spanish place whose overgrown garden
I yearn to explore,
the one rumored to belong to an artist,
is being cleaned up,
piles of cactus trunks by the front steps.
And the lady with the broom garden
is letting it grow up in weeds.